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How To Scale Your Business With Your Own Lead Generation System

If you want to grow your business, you must create your own lead generation system but most importantly, have a follow-up system that you can use to relentlessly pursue your leads and increase conversion. You need to have a source of leads without relying on popular review sites like Zillow, Yelp, Angie’s List, Home Advisor, and Amazon.

Hey guys, it’s your pal, Jesse Stoddard here. I am going to talk to you – I got note cards even to try to figure out what I’m going to talk about today to make sure I don’t wander off too far, but I’m talking about what’s working now. This is a shout out specifically to small business owners, and independent sales professionals, real estate agents, mortgage brokers in particular. I’m going to be talking about real estate agents a lot, but this does apply to a variety of businesses. Now, first of all, here’s the deal. You need a follow-up system before you bother having a bunch of leads. Either purchase leads marketing efforts, having lines in the water, building out your marketing machine. You need to make absolutely sure you have a sound follow-up system in place. The second thing is that you need to attract leads and fill the pipeline.

If you want to grow your business, you need to have a source of leads. If you want more referrals, you need to have leads that can turn into happy customers that you can then get referrals from. If you’re going to be able to give referrals to referral partners, you need to have leads to provide them. If you want to receive referrals from referral partners, you need to be able to reciprocate by giving them leads, so they’re more likely to provide you with leads. If you show that you create happy customers because you had leads that you turned into satisfied customers, your referral partners are more likely to give you leads. Now the third thing is you need to execute without whining. So if you have a sound follow-up system, basically a sale system, I call it a follow-up system because I really believe that the essence of sales is actually follow up, to one of the most critical parts anyway.

If you have a good value proposition, you’re a good person, and you’re trustworthy, then you need a follow-up system to make sure people know that you care. A lot of times people don’t know you, like you or trust you, yet they’re not going to do business with you. But if you keep following up, they eventually will as long as you continue to provide value. Follow up system should include some software because you may not trust yourself always to remember everything. If you’re old school, you better have a lot of paper and pen systems and calendars and use them. If your new school, be careful that you don’t get caught up in too much tech, you can get blown away by all the tech, and you miss the cart for the horse or the forest for the trees.

Whatever analogy works for you and you major in minor things because really it’s an 80, 20 deal. 20% of what you do is going to be responsible for 80% of the results. So the mere fact that you’re following up consistently is probably good enough. You probably don’t need to go really high tech. Every time I go high tech, it costs a lot of money, and half the time it doesn’t work, and then it breaks. Whereas when I go simple doesn’t cost very much money. It’s beautifully simplistic, easy, less moving parts to break. And at the end of the day, it puts my focus back on what I need to be, which is helping other people. So too much emphasis on tech can be harmful. So if you do have a lot of tech requirements and get someone to help you with that and do stick to what you’re good at, have them do tech.

If you are really good at tech then probably and you want to do it all yourself, just be careful with your time and really maybe you should find someone who’s better at sales and you do the tech. Think about that. All right, so then, attracting the leads, filling your pipeline is very important that you always have leads coming in. If you are a real estate agent and you are building your whole brand, well I’m going to tell you right now, most people don’t see the difference between you and everybody else. I’m going to ask you this question. I want you to answer it honestly and leave it in the comments. I would love to see your comments in or challenge me if you like. Even just leave a comment that we can start a discussion on this. This is a big one.

If I’m the prospective buyer or seller of a home and I want to list with an agent, why should I do business with you compared to all of your competitor, rather than using any of your competitors or any other option available to me, including doing nothing? I think this is Dan Kennedy’s way of asking it, which I think is brilliant. I think he might even trademark it. So you know, Dan, we give you credit. Go to his site, buy his stuff. But something like this where the key question is why I should buy from you rather than any of your competitors or any of my other options to solve my problem, including doing nothing, which is an option, right? You have to answer that question. Now. Most of the time the answer is well because I’m great. I got good customer service.

So none of the other agents have good customer service. While I’m not saying that mine’s better, how do you quantify that? Well because I have more testimonials. Than who? Than everybody? No one else has any testimonials? Because I charge the same as all the other agents. You charge a fee that’s relatively the same as everybody else. So the price isn’t lower. You give any money at the end to the client? Well, a little bit, but not much. You paid for the home staging, cashback closing? Well, yes. No, a little bit, but so does the guy down the street. So in other words, what you’re telling me is you cost the same, you don’t really offer anything different. I mean really substantially different. And maybe in your mind, well I have experienced, and the others don’t. But how do you prove that and is that really clear to the potential buyer or seller, the customer?

If you can’t show that you’re any different from anybody else, then how are you going to get business? Well, I’m going to tell you one way that you can, that’s by being FIRST. BE FIRST. BE THE FIRST ONE TO THE MARKETPLACE. How do you be first? Well, you have to know who’s in the market, who’s in the market for what you sell. If you’re a real estate agent, you’re looking for people that are in the market to sell their home, and they’re looking for someone to list with. Or they’re looking to buy a home. If you’re a mortgage broker looking to get a mortgage, buy or refinance, right? So how do you find somebody who’s like that? Well, that’s what we talk about in a lot of my other videos. You need to have an in-market targeting type system. You need to do your own lead generation and not rely on the big boys.

You know, if you are relying on Zillow, they’re selling it to everybody else. By the time it gets there, everybody else has seen it. Boomtown, any of those, nothing against them. They’re good services. There’s nothing wrong with getting leads from them, but I’m going to tell you right now, the more you become reliant on them, the more power you’re giving them and the less power you have. And you are just another small fish in a big pond with lots of lots of other fish. So having your own lead generation system, your own marketing machine is essential so that you can have enough leads getting into the system. You can get to them first before your competitors. That’s the big takeaway here. And then finally, execute without whining. If you get a lot of leads, and then you realize you don’t like working well, then you shouldn’t have gone into business for yourself to begin with, because it’s all about work.

You can’t avoid it. So if you’re going to execute, then you can play this game. If you’re not going to follow up, then don’t. Now you can use technology to help. I have a client of mine, Ryan uses a call service to help make all the phone calls to the leads, kind of prescreening. Nothing wrong with that or an assistant or if you are a broker and you have multiple agents, you can give it to them. But here’s the deal. You’ve got to do that work. You need to call fast within one to five minutes can increase your closing percentage by nearly 400% and then you need to follow up. If you are there first, you can position yourself better as a solution provider. You can frame or pre-frame the conversation showing them why your value proposition is the ideal choice over and above any competitor, including other services that aren’t direct competitors and or doing nothing.

And you can show up more often for cheaper, which helps build the consistency, the memory, and the branding. Now let me ask you this, can people act on something they don’t remember? No, no they don’t. They can’t. So you have to be memorable, which means you have to be there regularly. How do you afford to do that? That’s expensive. If you know who they are, if they know the needles in haystacks, it’s cheaper to advertise to them. So those are the three big things, have the system of follow-up in place or at least, a working system that you can improve as you go, dump leads in and then execute. It sounds so easy, and yet it’s so easy to overlook, and a lot of people aren’t doing it. If you’ve been listening here and you’re curious, hey, I want to know more about how I can get a lead generation system going from my business.

Now, if you’re a real estate agent right now, I’ve got something very special called our seller leads program, not buyer leads like everybody else. It is a very different seller leads, and all you have to go is to Get Leads First. Obviously got to get to lead before your sales process even matters and also you want to get there first before your competitors. So getleadsfirst.com and if you have another kind of business and you just want to check out what we’re doing, go to Stoddard Agency. You can learn more about our in market targeting program and lead generation. Okay. If you need leads. But I’m also gonna tell you one other little quick story. I have a client now, a mortgage broker, and I went into their office to talk to them about what they have to look forward to with these leads and educate them on how to get the most out of it properly. In case they thought I was nefarious or something. And I realized I wanted to share this in one of these videos because I had somebody email me the other day and said, it all sounds great except for I don’t want to invest in your hundred percent guaranteed refundable deposit. I’ve heard that before. I’ve never gotten money back. And I thought, wow, that’s sad. We live in a sad world. First of all, I feel bad for her because like, wow, you know, people don’t give you your money back when they promised. I mean, and then you’ve got to take them to a court or something. I don’t know. That was sad to me. I’m giving money to people all the time and just on blind faith. So I must be like a sucker or something cause I buy everything. I buy all the courses.

All the $3,000 courses, 6,000, I bought something for six grand to learn how to do stuff and then I’m paying money for advertising with no guarantee that it’s ever going to do anything for some of these agents. You know, it’s been anywhere from three to $6,000 a month just to produce leads. It’s a lot of money, and I’m just doing it on blind faith. Not blind faith. I’d say it’s a calculated risk because we do know what we’re doing in terms of what we can expect, but there is still a risk. Even if you run all the numbers, there’s a risk. So I don’t know what to tell her. I felt terrible, but I think that’s just the world we live in.

And so I want to make a video, maybe, hopefully, you guys, as you get to know me and you get to know where my heart is, I really do want to help, that maybe you’ll go, okay, well this makes sense. So if you want to find out how I work at all and exactly how I create the leads and exactly what you can expect you go to getleadsfirst.com. Now, when I went to the mortgage company, I said, all right, here’s how this all came about. I used to do it all the other agencies did, right? And all the other agencies, all my competitors, they say we’re going to run your ads for you, your Pay Per Click ads, Facebook, Google, whatever. We’re going to charge you a retainer, fee, X dollars a month. Here’s what you probably can expect. No guarantees. Here are your leads. Good luck. Give me money, and then I’ll do work for you. That’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Part of my business still runs on that system, but, I wanted to do something different. Okay. I was also looking for a way to provide better service. So I’m sitting with my buddy Phil, who owns the mortgage brokerage and we were having lunch, every other week for years. And I’m sitting here hearing about the what they have to go through in their business, and I’m the marketing guy, and yet we’ve never worked together. And so finally I’m like, Gosh, I got to find a way to provide a better service. I want to create more opportunities for them and for me. I want to remove the obstacles that are usually in the way, and we’ll make it easier. So all of these things, I’m thinking in my mind. And finally I went to him and said, hey, what if I just, what if a little bit of money seed capital here, but really I put my money where my mouth is, and you don’t really have to pay for the leads, and I guarantee it all, and then you just pay me when it’s proven to be successful.
And they’re like, what? Like nobody does that. Everybody charges the retainer fee, or they charge per lead. You know, 50 hundred dollars a lead you buy 30 leads for three grand or 50 leads for five grand or whatever, and then you’re just like, wow, that’s terrible. Or The Zillow leads for 100 bucks and you’re like, the person’s a Yahoo, and you’re like, I just wasted 100 bucks. Like it’s painful. So I’m gonna remove
that obstacle. So I said, hey, let’s do this other way. This, nobody else is doing this. This is crazy. Well, why would I do it? A.) I believe in small business, and I believe that we need small business. I want to encourage it. I want to be a part of that process. I want to partner with people. I’m looking for longterm business relationships. B.) The powerful suppliers are taking over, and we need to take back power from them. Those big companies that produce review sites and directory sites in the Zillows and the Yelps of the world and the Home Advisors by Angie’s List. They have a lot of power, but we need to get some power back from them. Then I also thought that, well, if I offer this guarantee, it’s kind of like I’m putting my name on the line too and we’re partnering rather than me just being a service provider.
And you could take it or leave it. I have to be careful how I say this because I’m not saying that other agencies do this, but I just don’t want to feel like a leech. Like I’m just like trying to get my claws in them to make some money. I just don’t like that. I want it to feel like a partnership. Like we’re in it together. So I offered this crazy thing, and I decided to do the unthinkable and invest in their company in the form of paying for the advertising for them, which is rare. Seldom happens. So now we have my second card, aligned motivations. So the aligned motivations now, because I’m investing in that advertising and I get paid based on the results after the fact, and I guarantee it all.
13:58 Now we have congruency. We’re in it together. We have less dissonance and friction between sales and marketing, right? Which happens typically out there, sales and marketing, we can be a synergistic team. Now we have the same alignment of incentives, right? We have the alignment of priorities. We have an alignment of mission, right? So, and I only make money when you do. That was the point. I make money when you do. So we are together. And then the other thing I wanted to say about it is, I’m not better. I’m not better. I’m not better at all. I’m not better than you. I’m not better than the sales team. Sales and marketing are often at odds in a business, but I feel like, no, no, no. We are two sides of the same coin, and it’s the Ying and the yang of it.

And we have to work together if we want to build something greater than the sum of its parts. So that’s what I focus on. I focus on that. I just want to do my job the best of my ability. Now, if you’re an expert marketer, cool and you’re watching this great, take some of these ideas and go run with it. But if you’re more of the business owner or the sale, usually you’re the lead salesperson, and you have a sales team. Why are you making them do all this marketing work instead of selling? If your unique ability is the communication and the selling and the customer service and problem-solving, your unique ability is helping people improve their lives and their situation. Stick to that and get better and better at sales.

Let a guy like me get better and better at marketing. We both could probably do both, but if we stay in our lane and work together, we’re going to be able to create a unique ability framework, teamwork. So I think that’s awesome. I’m gonna give you a bonus card today. Unique ability teamwork. By the way, if you’re listening right now to this on the podcast and you’re not watching, I’m just sitting here and I’m basically just talking through these cards and there’s only a couple of points on them and one of them is go to www.getleadsfirst.com especially if you’re a real estate agent. And you can also click around to other parts of my website if you want and see what we do within market targeting.

But I’ve got a special seller lead program there. All right, so the unique ability teamwork, this leads into unique ability teamwork. By the way, Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach talks a lot about this. This is his baby. Definitely check them out, buy all their stuff. It’s amazing. All right. A great synergy in a team requires everybody having a right seat on the bus and doing the thing that they’re best at, that they enjoy doing, that they get energy from and not doing the things that they don’t enjoy or get energy from and cooperatively working together to create that synergy. That is unique ability teamwork. You are fantastic at sales. If you’re watching this and you are real estate agent, mortgage broker or another entrepreneur, small business owner, you’re awesome at sales, or you’re trying to get better at sales, you need to, right?

It’s the lifeblood of your business. So I’m awesome at testing. I don’t say I’m awesome at marketing. There are no awesome, amazing, incredible marketers. Really, it’s a really amazing tester because that’s all we do. We don’t really know until we test, right? But the more we focus on strengths, the better we get. And the more you focus on sales, the better you get. The more I focused on marketing to help you, the better we get together, and we can create something better by working together. That’s the main point I want to hit. Let’s keep going. Card number four mindset. This training, by the way, came from when I met with these mortgage brokers and decided to help them with a lot of their process in their business. Hi Raymond. Looks like Raymond’s watching. Good to see you, buddy. Hope you’re doing well.

I have another Facebook live on my personal page that’s a little bit more exciting than this one may be. It’s different. This one’s all about my help with the business, small businesses. So glad to have you though, bud. So mindset. All right, so I’m talking about the mindset when it comes to small business, especially if you’re doing sales and you’re trying to get new customers. Well, it’s always easier to be skeptical, jaded and grizzled. It’s always easier. It’s so easy. So when you’re looking at the world through this framework, and you’re thinking, man, I need to get, I need to hustle, I need to get something going. It’s easy to look at all of the options out there, especially in the world of marketing and lead generation. It’s easy to look at that and go, it didn’t work.

I tried that once. It’ll never work again, and you got to avoid that. I really believe that it’s harder to have faith in the process, but it’s better. It’s harder, it’s easier to be jaded, it’s harder to have faith in the process. This goes for all of life, right? So if you know a process works, you have to push yourself a little bit to stick with it long enough to really find out whether it works or not. And if it’s worked for other people, I believe it can work for you too. Okay. Now, quick story. I had a client, an attorney-client, and in 30 days we got them 18 leads and one case out of it. Now, I don’t know about you, those numbers may or may not impress you, but what that meant was, is the attorneys got a new case. Now, the average personal injury case could be worth 10, 20, $30,000 of revenue of fees to an attorney.

That’s a lot of money. But they had to want to work and make those phone calls. So going back to my original point, you have to want to work. You have , so I can tee up leads and, or you could have all these systems, but you have to want to make the phone calls. I don’t know if they really wanted to, but they were happy when they got one. So that example is an interesting one because the money was there for them, but I don’t know if they really wanted it that bad. Let me give you another example. Here’s one where a real estate agent. No, sorry. 32 Pearls. Love these guys. If you’re in Seattle or Tacoma and you’re looking for a dentist, check out 32pearls.com.

My buddy Mike owns those practices. Amazing. And they do a great job. Really Nice people. And they just renovated like the Tacoma office. Beautiful. And the Seattle ones down on the water. It’s very, very cool. Cool area. They started on February 2nd with lead generation. We’ve got them 209; actually, this was a couple of days old now, a couple of days ago, we had 209 leads for them, and they already turned 22 of them in the patients. That’s a pretty good return on investment. That’s a pretty good, pretty good return. Now a lot of those people are just getting teeth cleanings, whatnot. But later some of them will get more work done, and their attitude was, they were kind of too busy to do like perfect follow up, but they were still following up, and they’re really making an effort, and I know that they appreciate that. And so again, it’s, they have to have a followup system.

They’ve got to get leads and then they got to do the work, and they’re doing it, and now they’ve got new patients. So it’s straightforward. This is not Rocket Science guys. The third one, He’s a real estate agent up in Bellingham, Washington. Alison, cool gal, by the way, if you’re up in Bellingham, contact Allison Fisher, she’s a really cool real estate agent, works for The Muljat Group. I don’t know how to pronounce that correctly. Sorry if I butchered it. But in the first five days, they got 40 leads through lead generation system, and she had three appointments, phone call, visit. I kind of think, well that’s a big deal when their seller leads and they’re looking to sell their home that they could be a listing. All it takes is one here for that to be a fascinating deal.

Now did she have to call 40? Yeah. Yup. But we also have text message and email and other ways to follow up with those people and to screen and to filter through. So, but A.), did she have a follow-up system? Yes, we have a CRM called Follow Up Boss works great. I highly recommend it. The next thing is, is she actually got the leads. We worked with her to get her the leads. And third is she was willing to make the calls. I’m trying to hit myself over a hit over the head with a hammer here just to say, look how easy it is. Fundamental, simple, simple, simple. By the way, if you’re wondering why I’m wearing this silly, get up, got just got done working out and I want to make a video for you and if you’re just tuning in and you’re curious to learn more about what we do for small businesses, go to stoddardagency.com or if you’re a real estate agent, you definitely want to check out our seller leads program.

It’s a fantastic video that I made for you that shows you exactly how to do it. You don’t even have to give your email, there’s, you don’t even have to opt-in for anything, and it’s at getleadsfirst.com. First, because you need leads before your sales processes worth anything. And second, because you want to get it to at first before your competitors. All right. So finally, I used to do booth and networking groups a lot. And what I found is that, I would do a booth, I talked to some people and I would just feel like it’s not worth it. You know, like I got a couple of customers and some people to follow up with, but it seems like drudgery. Well, I did it for a long time and I did fairly okay with it.

And then like a year or so but this other guy who was doing it with John, he just kept doing it and they later called them The Booth Daddy because he did so many booths. But here’s what happened when I kind of fizzled out with them in a previous business, I was in a direct sales company. I’m. Actually, I’m still with that. I just didn’t, haven’t done booths in a while. I’m going to do one on Friday. I shouldn’t say previous. It’s just a different business. I kind of fizzled out with it. And my buddy kept doing it and a couple of years later he had built out this huge paycheck because he had built a pretty large part of his business from that. Same with networking groups. I did a networking group, like Be An Island, Le Tip for four years.

I still have some great friends, customers, clients from that. But at the time it felt like this is not happening fast enough. And so basically I kind of got out of that group and then somebody else filled my spot and I couldn’t get back in. Darn it. Now meanwhile, my other buddy who kept doing networking groups and never quit, he turns around and has like a giant business. I think he’s making it an additional, I can’t quote numbers here, but it’s a large income because of his time there and a large like ridiculous. And I’m looking at it going, oh, I should have stuck with it. So I know that has nothing to do with online lead generation, but I wanted to bring those as another example of other lead generation that you have to stick with the process. You have to A.), have a follow-up system ready to go for longterm followup B.) You’ve got to have the system will little booths and the networking meetings count, but then C.) You gotta be willing to do the work and stick with it for the long haul.

Stop looking for the short term quick fix. Start Looking for the longterm success path. All right guys, that’s card number four. I’m gonna continue next time with card number five and six, and they’re the best ones. I’m going to talk about strategy and sales system, so if you enjoy it, if you got anything out of this today, please leave a comment. I love comments, questions, I would love to answer them. And the go to Get Leads First. You can also go to Stoddard Agency for general information about what we do. I will talk to you guys next time. Have a great day. Take care.